Hi, all. I’m an 18-year-old male going to university in England in just a few days and I would appreciate some advice on what I could do to improve my social skills.
Basically, I haven’t had any real-life friends in around 3 years (or, since secondary school). There’s some people I talk to online, but not regularly, and I’m not exactly close with them.
I went through sixth form (ages 16-18) mostly just keeping to myself, but in the few instances where an opportunity to make friends was presented to me (or I made the effort to introduce myself to people) I just could not maintain a relationship. For example, when I was 17, I was able to converse with another boy in my class for a full day while on a school-related trip just before summer break, and I even got his contact details, but I just never spoke to him again out of nervousness or shyness or something. The idea of talking to him again terrified me. I sat next to him in class after the summer holiday (during which I didn’t contact him once) but didn’t say a word, and just the thought of doing so made my heart race. I ended up moving seats to sit on my own. I’m like this with almost anyone. Essentially, I’m terrified of people my age. I’m terrified of potential friends. It sucks.
My only real interests are probably criminology and video games, there’s little else I find interesting, which is annoying because it’s hard to find people that can relate to it. Sure, lots of people play video games, but there’s so many video games and so many platforms that I’ve yet to encounter a single person who even plays video games on a PC like I do, never mind the playing the somewhat more niche games I like. Criminology, yeah, it’s true that a lot of people are into true crime and serial killer Netflix documentaries or whatever, but that’s not really what I’m interested in particularly. My focus is more on terrorism, corporate crime and state crimes, which people tend to find either boring or disturbing to talk about, and I don’t blame them for that. I’m doing Criminology as my degree in university, so hopefully I can meet some like-minded people that way. I’ll join the university’s criminology student group thing and maybe I’ll make friends there.
I know people aren’t going to have the same interests as me exactly, and I have no issue with that, the issue is that I feel I have nothing I can contribute in a conversation. I’m a good listener, and I can talk about whatever the other person is talking about for a bit, but it just gets to the point where all I’m doing is asking questions and nodding along and I don’t actually contribute anything to the conversation. People get tired of that, I’ve noticed. It feels like whenever I try and talk about one of my interests, people just get that look in their eye, that look that says ‘what the fuck are you talking about’ or just a look of pure boredom. To be clear, I don’t just straight up talk about terrorism to people because I know that is generally not an acceptable conversation topic, but it feels like I just inherently talk in a wrong way, like I have no idea how to contribute to a conversation.
I don’t think I’m physically unattractive, so I don’t think that’s the issue. I think I have good hygiene, I’m not overweight, etc. I don’t mean to disparage people that may struggle with these things, but I know that some (perhaps more shallow) people may not approach you if you’re like that. For once in my life, I’m actually quite happy with how I look. Unfortunately, I have a resting bitch face, and my mum says I look serious all the time, which I don’t really realise.
I don’t blame others for my social failings, I know it’s something wrong with me, I just don’t know what, or rather I don’t know how to fix it. I’ve never been to a doctor to get diagnosed with any disorder or whatever, but I suspect there’s something wrong there. I know that people will say “just stop giving a fuck”, but I can’t. Trust me, it’s the same advice I’d give others, but I just can’t apply it to myself.
In all, I’m both terrified and excited for university. I’m excited at the prospect of being able to potentially meet new people in a new environment and more or less revitalise myself socially, but I’m terrified that it might just be another 3-4 years of the same old. I know this post is long and rambling, and if you actually read this whole thing I’d be quite surprised and it’s definitely appreciated, but I just wanted to put my feelings out there somewhere more than anything. Any advice is of course welcome though 🙂
(I cut this post down quite a bit to hopefully get by rule 2, so if you’d like me to elaborate on anything leave a comment :))